FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CONCERT HALL - PAGE 3

The Philadelphia Orchestra is on the verge of a technological first, possibly a big one. Sunday afternoon's Kimmel Center concert was seen and heard live in six locations, from the University of Pennsylvania to Portugal and Denmark, in an experimental "multicast" via the fiber-optic broadband educational network known as Internet2. Orchestra officials expect to offer open-to-the-public live transmissions during the 2007-08 season - similar to the Metropolitan Opera's live simulcasts (new this season, and wildly popular)

Philadelphia Orchestra leaders yesterday were scrambling to determine how bad a hit they had taken in the aftermath of the collapse of the Foundation for New Era Philanthropy. New Era recently sparked the orchestra's proposed concert-hall effort with an attractive offer: $5 million if the orchestra could raise another $5 million for the hall - the centerpiece of Mayor Rendell's Avenue of the Arts urban revitalization project. The orchestra was in the middle of meeting that challenge when New Era's doors slammed shut.

Never mind the criminal justice system's churning on around them. This group of county workers, gathered on the grand stairway inside the Montgomery County Courthouse, was ready to sing. In a courtroom near the top of the marble staircase, Judge Albert R. Subers was about to sentence a Hatfield man on burglary and weapons charges. A chorus of hallelujahs interrupted from below. "Off the record, we're going to have a little competition here," Subers said to those in the courtroom, some of whom were rolling their eyes.

It was supposed to be the big coming-out party for the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and Stephanie W. Naidoff was supposed to help introduce Philadelphia's glittering new debutant to the media tastemakers. But two days after Naidoff was dislodged as president of the Regional Performing Arts Center, she was no longer around to pitch Rafael Vi?oly's concert hall to 35 architecture, travel and music journalists assembled last night in the architect's downtown office. Instead, that task fell to the center's chairman, Willard G. Rouse 3d, who has temporarily assumed Naidoff's duties as president.

A local sportswear manufacturer who isn't even a regular at concerts made the Philadelphia Orchestra a tantalizing offer yesterday. He'll put up $12 million toward a new orchestra hall if the orchestra can raise twice as much - $24 million - from other sources in the next two years. The gift is the largest individual donation to a new concert hall on South Broad Street so far, and the elated chairman of the orchestra's board called the money "a giant step forward" toward construction of the keystone building in the city's Avenue of the Arts project.

Flop houses. A liquor store. A gay bar routinely raided by the cops. They're all gone now. The little neighborhood bound by Broad and 15th, Spruce and Delancey may not have been as swank as nearby Rittenhouse Square, but it sure made for interesting living, says Eleanor Sokoloff. She ought to know, having inhabited this little patch of urbia for 35 years. Sokoloff and her husband, Vladimir, raised two daughters in a little house here. They taught piano to who knows how many students here.

A Philadelphia theater architect has put forward an alternative that he maintains would meet many of the city's cultural needs at a fraction of the costs projected in the proposed Avenue of the Arts on South Broad Street. Under his plan: The Philadelphia Orchestra would remain in the venerable Academy of Music, its home since its first season in November 1900. A new concert hall, keystone of the proposed Avenue of the Arts, would not be built. A second hall, nearly the size of the 2,929-seat Academy of Music, would be provided by renovating the 2,300-seat Boyd Theater, the movie house now called the Sameric I, on Chestnut Street between 19th and 20th Streets.

Mary Louise Bove has a big living room. Four years ago she decided to turn it into her own concert hall where she and her friends could listen to professional musicians. The musicians were often between gigs on the Philadelphia/Washington circuit, she said, and were willing to play for what her friends donated. Bove never realized that those concerts would lead her to team with Oxford Friends Meeting to form a club that promotes a variety of music/dance and other related performing acts in the region.

Glamour, architecture and controversy quickened the weekend opening of the glass-browed Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. This glowing, spacious concert hall, 10 years in the building, has come to symbolize the gradual revival of a city battered by the oil storms of the '80s. The limestone-and-glass-walled structure is the work of architect I. M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson, who has designed the sound for Philadelphia's proposed new concert hall. It stands in what Dallas hopes may become an arts district, facing the Museum of Art and the metal barn housing the Dallas Theater Center.

Even as fund-raising proceeds for a new home for the Philadelphia Orchestra, some of Philadelphia's most powerful and influential citizens are quietly floating alternative plans - some of which envision an Avenue of the Arts without a new concert hall. Some of them are pitching the plans to Mayor Rendell, who sees the new hall as the centerpiece of his grand Avenue of the Arts concept. Those opposed to the hall include philanthropists Walter H. Annenberg and R. Anderson "Andy" Pew, chairman of the Pew Charitable Trusts.